Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Capitalism & Christianity - Part 12

HIGHLIGHTED COMMODITY - SUGAR

In Part 11, we was how sugar was one commodity that took off on the wings of respectability. Sometimes, studying one particular commodity is a way of gaining a fuller perspective on capitalism in all its complexity. In this installment, we will look at sugar.

The first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an
English worker was a significant historical event, because it prefigured
the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its
economic and social basis. We must struggle to understand fully the
consequences of that and kindred events for upon them was erected an
entirely different conception of the relationship between producers and
consumers, of the meaning of work, of the definition of self, of the
nature of things.

-Sydney Mintz, “Sweetness and Power”

In Grecia, Costa Rica, where once I resided, the mountains are
checkered with vast coffee and sugarcane fields. The cane has long
leaves like corn. It rattles in the wind, and the fields go dark then
light again as clouds pass over.

I had my first taste of raw cane in Vietnam, when a local man offered
me a stick to pacify my imperial hatred. I still love cane, like a
child, the crisp biting off, the chewing out of the melony sweetness,
and spitting the bagasse. I still carry the guilt that man’s kindness
stamped on me.

Nicaraguans work the cane fields here in Costa Rica. 90 percent of
the laborers are Nicaraguans. Nicaragua is Costa Rica’s poor neighbor,
and like the US – where our poor neighbors from Mexico and Central
America are employed to lower the wage floor – Nicaraguans are the grunt
workers. Like the Hispano-Latinas that work in the US, the Nicaraguans
here – some working only for food – are reviled by their hosts.
It’s the one ugly aspect of Costa Rican society that contaminates a
people otherwise cordial and peaceable in my experience, this national
emity against los Chochos.

People seem compelled to strip away the personhood of a lower caste,
much as I stripped away the personhood of Vietnamese, because I was
obliged by circumstance to control them. It inoculates us from
responsibility. We are no longer our bothers’, or sisters’, keepers.

The brutal strenuousness of cane work was the reason it was
associated early on with slavery. In the absence of debt and
dependency, no subsistence farmer would work for a wage in the cane
fields. Workers had to be separated from their land, by debt,
expropriation, or kidnapping. Ivan
Illich once noted, “Modern development has been, at bottom, a war on
subsistence.”

Sugarcane was first cultivated for crystalline sugar in India, around
350 AD to please the palates of the dominant caste. By the 7th
Century, Arabs were cultivating it as a commodity on plantations; and
this is when slavery became economically associated with the production
of crystalline sugar, later called by European purchasers “the sweet
salt.”

Nonetheless, it was a niche commodity. There was neither the
capacity nor the demand for the expansion of a “sugar industry” until
the 15th Century, when a sugarcane roller-mill was designed in the
Mediterranean. Cane has a tough outer skin, puncutated with hard knots,
and the spongy bagasse re-absorbed the sugar juice as it exited the
older presses. The new design doubled the output; and the search for
the new design contributed significantly to the industrial revolution.

Like the cotton gin in North America, this one machine had profound
consequences for relations of production and land in the Americas,
because the press made more and larger plantations profitable.
With the European migration to the Americas, beginning with Columbus
later in the same century, sugar became the prime mover in the African
slave trade. The ideal climate for sugar production is subtropical and
tropical; and the so-called New World – largley uncultivated – provided
vast expanses of fertile land for sugar plantations. Indigenous
populations living on those lands rather quickly fell before European
diseases against which they had little natural immunity, and before the
guns of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese militias. Without the
indigenous as slaves, sugar production defaulted to the use of African
slaves as the lowest-cost available labor.

In C. L. R. James’ lively account of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins,
he describes the incredible, and often gratutious, cruelty of French
slaveowners in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), then the most productive and
profitable colony in the hemisphere. It was more profitable in some
cases to work slaves to death than to sustain them.

When profit dehumanizes a population to this degree, then
profit-makers have to prove that dehumanization with sadism, again and
again, to justify themselves. As punishment for minor infractions, and
sometimes as drunken sport, slaves were subjected to incredible cruelty.

The whip was not always an ordinary cane or woven
cord…sometimes it was replaced by a thick thong of cow hide, or by the
lianes, a local growth of reeds, supple and pliant like whale bone…The
slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they
received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian for
discipline. But there was no ingenuity that fear of a depraved
imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirits
and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians.

Irons on the hands and feet, blocks of weed that the slaves had to
drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to
prevent the slaves eating sugar cane, the iron collar. Whipping was
interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the
victims; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured
on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and
sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasure which they
could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on
their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling sugar over their
heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with
gun power and blew them up with a match (this was called 'to burn a
little powder in the ass of a nigger'); buried them up to their necks
and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them,
fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made then eat their
excrement, drink their urine and lick the saliva of other slaves.

The visciousness and greed of the French colonials engendered its own
consequences. When slave-Generals Touissant L’Overture, Jean Jacques
Dessalines, and Henri Cristophe led the rebellious slaves in an
insurrection against the French overlords, Napolean Bonaparte’s treasury
was depleted by the counter-insurgency effort. He needed money, and
fast, to fight the British, leading him to negotiate the Louisiana
Purchase with President Jefferson – himself a slaveowner – in the
newly-minted United States. All or part of 14 eventual states were
acquired through that purchase, netting Napolean 60 million francs in
cash and 18 million francs in debt forgiveness for the United States.
The then-residents of the “purchase,” of course, were not consulted on
the sale.

When sugar was first imported to Europe, it was a luxury item.
Taking their cue from Asians, it was seen first as a medicinal agent.
Given sugar’s demonstrated effects on serotonin levels, it is not
surprising that these effects were incorporated into the body of health
and healing lore.

Constant consumption of sugar, like our constant consumption
of sugar, masks those effects – effects that are further masked by the
smorgasbord of chemicals that modern metropolitans consume in our
obsessive and alienated monitoring of how we happen to physically feel
at any given moment.

Mintz details a host of interesting, and often bizarre medicinal uses
for sugar in the past. He quotes Tobias Venner, 1620, writing to
compare the medicinal value of honey with that of sugar:

Sugar is temperately hot and moist, of a detersive
facultie, and good for the obstructions of the breast and lungs; but it
is not so strong in operation against phlegm as honey… Sugar agreeth
with all ages and complexions; but contrariwise, Honie annoyeth many,
especially those that are choleric, or full of wind in their bodies…
Water and pure sugar onely brewed together, is very good for hot,
cholericke, and dry bodies, that are affected with phlegm in their
breast…

In the same year, a medical man named James Hart questioned sugar’s medicinal efficacy in Klinicke and the Diet of Diseases.
This controversy lasted for more than a century. In Dr. Frederick
Slare wrote an apologetic tract on behalf of medicinal sugar entitled A Vindication of Sugar Against the Charges of Dr. Willis, Other Physicians, and Common Prejudice: Dedicated to the Ladies.
Slare touted sugar as a veritable cure-all, its one drawback being
that it, in his opinion, made women too fat when taken in excess.
Sugar was becoming cheaper and more available to lower classes, and
so was being promoted by the sugar industry that endeavored to produce
greater demand through such propaganda. But the real explosion of the
sugar market, especially in England, was opened up by the simultaneous
trends of enclosure and industrialization.

In the late medieval period, a new international commodity came on
the scene in England: wool. This ignited an antagonism between the
interests of subsistence farmers and sheep owners that lasted from the
13th Century to the 19th Century, whereupon the English government
decisively came down on the side of the wool industry.

The outcome of this antagonism – lost by the subsistence farmers –
was called “enclosure.” In brief, small arable plots of land were
consolidated and then "enclosed," that is, deeded to one owner and
fenced off. Each step forward by the enclosure movement created larger
and larger numbers of landless peasants, who were seen as potential
threats to social stability (ergo, occasional opposition to enclosure
from the aristocracy), and who were forced in many cases to go to the
emerging cities to seek their survival. Enclosure, then, went hand in
hand with the evolution of urbanization.

Urbanization itself created the conditions necessary for
industrialization by creating a vast army of desperately unemployed poor
living in squalid conditions in the cities. These conditions were the
background for Charles Dickens’ novels, and came to be know as
“Dickensian conditions” by future scribblers.
As production of sugar increased during that same general
industrializing process, it became cheap enough to be available to this
new class of industrial workers, along with a cheap source of caffeine –
tea – from the English colony in India. For these industrial laborers,
heavily sugared tea became an energy substitute for more nutritious and
expensive fare. Mintz called sugar and tea “proletarian hunger
killers.”

As we saw in the last installment, sugar also became a status product associated with the invention of "respectability."

For the first time in history, a large metropolitan population became
accustomed to consuming sugar – more sugar than any population had
every used – and more than the human organism had ever evolved to
metabolize.

This process of the sugar-ization of the human diet – especially in
the industrial metropoles – has grown until the present. Today, in the
United States, the average person consumes 31 five-pound bags of sugar a
year. This doesn’t count the recent addition of vast quantitites of
cheap high fructose corn syrup to the US diet. In 1700, the average
person consumed around 4 pounds of sugar a year. That means we are
approaching an eight-fold increase.

What happens to us when we eat this white stuff? We can start with the senstation.

Taste receptor T1R3 gives us our ability to experience sweetness.
Its evolutionary advantge – reinforced by the pleasurability of
sweetness – is that it allowed our ancestors to identify the difference
between edible and poisonous (bitter) materials for nourishment.
Obviously, refined sugar did not exist half a million years ago, so
evolution had no part in what we today refer to as sugar craving, aside
from this T1R3 receptor’s ability to discern the presence of natural
sugars (a high-energy input). One can’t crave a food that does not yet
exist.
The pleasurability of sweetness, however, can lead us – like any
highly sensible organism – to seek it out for the pleasurable sensation
alone. Pleasure is biologically traceable to the release of chemicals
into our brains, in this case seratonin, a powerful neurotransmitter
that we experience as a “high” of well-being.

A large bolus of sugar can stimulate a corresponding bolus of
seratonin. Stimulation is not problematic when the endocrine system – a
complex set of feedback loops – is stable (homeostatic). But the human
metabolic system did not emerge in response to large quantities of
crystal sugar, a substance that takes what would naturally be a gentle
progression of shallow metabolic waves and converts them into roller
coaster highs and lows.

The seratonin-sugar connection is mediated by insulin production –
the hormone that facilitates glucose (simple sugar) metabolism in the
body. Large quantities of sugar are recognized by the endocrine system
as large amounts of more complex nutrients, creating an insulin
production overshoot, metabolizing the sugar with insulin to spare.

Insulin without sugar is dangerous, and – as some diabetics know –
can lead to an emergency called “insulin shock.” Glucose is a more
immediate necessity to the brain than oxygen, and an oversupply of
circulating insulin can deplete glucose to dangerously low levels. Most
of us have experienced this condition momentarily – hypoglycemia – when
we perhaps consumed a sweetened coffe or fruit juice for breakfast,
without other food, then found ourselves suddenly becoming weak-kneed
and shaky a couple of hours later.
Refined sugar, then, increases the frequency of our experience of
hunger, as well as stimulating a radically oscillating seratonin cycle
that is experienced as feeling low without it and feeling high with it.

Whether this makes sugar “addictive” is controversial; but only
because the definition of “addiction” is itself the bone of contention.
It certainly associates sugar with the statistical trend toward obesity
in many societies, though, which corresponds to an epidemic of
diabetes.

This was not understood by scientists until the 20th Century, so
these effects were not associated with sugar in a causal way, or in
their consequences, when sugar first became a European commodity. The
effects occurred nonetheless. Sugar came with a built-in dependency, as
well as its psychological attraction - the pleasurable sensations
deployed in the face of distress, or the modern phenomenon of "comfort
food" in the midst of our epoch's consumer driven-ness and alienation.

This reinforcement at the most visceral level has made sugar a
formdable commodity even in the face of greater public understanding
about the health effects of excessive and frequent sugar consumption.
In 2006, the International Diabetes Federation wrote:

Diabetes, mostly type 2 diabetes, now affects 5.9% of the
world’s adult population with almost 80% of the total in developing
countries. The regions with the highest rates are the Eastern
Mediterranean and Middle East, where 9.2 % of the adult population are
affected, and North America (8.4%). The highest numbers, however, are
found in the Western Pacific, where some 67 million people have
diabetes, followed by Europe with 53 million.

India leads the global top ten in terms of the highest number of
people with diabetes with a current figure of 40.9 million, followed by
China with 39.8 million. Behind them come USA; Russia; Germany; Japan;
Pakistan; Brazil; Mexico and Egypt. Developing countries account for
seven of the world’s top.

One cannot lay the diabetes epidemic solely at sugar’s door.
Obviously, lifestyle and genetics contribute to diabetes’ morbidity; but
the introduction of increasing quantities of this substance is just as
obviously involved.

One sure predictor of higher morbidity is poverty, especially poverty
inside the developed metropoli. Low-cost calories, just as they were
for the factory workers of Dickens’ age, are almost a staple for the
poverty-diet.

The microvascular and macrovascular effects of diabetes
also exacerbate the condition of cardiovascular patients. Juvenile
diabetes, especially Type 2 – once rare in juveniles – is now a major
public health concern in the United States. It will remain a concern
for a long time.

One of the main concerns with type 2 juvenile diabetes is the affects
it can have later on in a child's life. Children with type 2 diabetes
have been found to have more life threatening complications than type 1
diabetics. Some of the major problems juveniles with this type of
diabetes face include heart disease, damage to the nervous system, renal
failure, blindness, and limb amputations, particularly of the feet and
lower legs.

-Andrew Bicknell

Now the issues with sugar have been compounded by the production of
corn sugar: High fructose corn syrup (HFCS). HFCS was put on the US
table by a combination of import tarrifs on foreign sugar (to insulate
the US sugar industry from foreign competition) and extremely generous
government subsidies to the domestic corn industry.

HFCS and table sugar are very close in terms of their relative
fructose content ( a health concern because fructose is metabolized in
the liver, putting stress on that organ, and rapidly converts fructose
into body fat. Recent reports of widespread mercury contamination in
HFCS, as well as increasing dissatisfaction with a corn industry that
has accumulated immense political power, have sullied the reputation of
HFCS, and sent many – partially informed – to see cane or beet sucrose
as “the good sugar.”)

The clash between the sugar industry and the corn industry is a clash
of the political titans. Both have been the recipients of billions of
dollars of the taxpayers’ largesse; and both industries routinely rent
their own elected officials.

LAST YEAR the Bush administration negotiated a free-trade
agreement with the five Central American nations and the Dominican
Republic. It has yet to submit the deal to Congress because trade
politics has grown so poisonous. Even though the Central America deal,
known by its acronym, CAFTA, would help a struggling region on the
doorstep of the United States, and even though it would modestly boost
U.S. prosperity, a coalition of special interests has seized Congress by
the throat. The most aggressive and least deserving of these is the
sugar lobby.

U.S. sugar policy stands for all that's bad about our political
system. The government restricts imports through a series of quotas,
pushing U.S. sugar prices to between two and three times the global
market rate. As a result, a handful of sugar producers, notably in
Florida, a battleground electoral state, pocket $1 billion a year in
excess profits. To protect this cozy arrangement, the sugar barons plow a
chunk of their revenue back into the political system. During the 2004
election cycle, two Florida sugar companies gave a total of $925,000 to
election coffers.

-“Big Sugar,” Washington Post Editorial, April 16, 2005

So consumers get to pay the sugar industry directly, through
subsidies, and again indirectly through doubled, or tripled, sugar
prices. This is just a peek at the story of big sugar, which I’ll leave
as it is, because the story of big sugar is easy to find, and it’s only
a premise here to another point.

The corn lobby, unlike the sugar lobby, doesn’t stand freely, but
exists as a subset of the Midwest agribusiness lobby centered around
three transnational corporations that dominate the sector:
Archer-Daniels-Midland, Cargill, and Monsanto.

The transformation of corn alongside the transformation of the
general economy has been driven by these leviathans’ quest for profit
and domination of the food market. Right now, they are green-washing
ethanol to perpetuate taxpayer subsidies for that land-wrecking
boondoggle. But we are looking specifically at the production of corn
sugar, or HFCS.

The competition between sugar producers and corn syrup producers has
muddied the water on the health and nutrition debates about sweeteners,
because any negative points produced independently against either
product is now grist for their competition.

Not our topic here, but a good one. Here we'll continue down the sugar path.

The sugar program is essentially a producer cartel run
out of Washington. The Agriculture Department operates a complex loan
program to guarantee sugar growers certain prices, which it enforces
with import barriers and domestic production controls.

-Chris Edwards

Almost $2 billion annually is culled from the pockets of taxpayers in
the United States to directly subsidize the sugar industry. US
consumers pay around $90 miilion in addition to that based on the higher
cost of ingredient-sugar in other products. While this example of
"corporate welfare" is a hot-button for a lot of people across various
political sprectra, the real assist the sugar cartel gets from
Washington is an import duty to prop up the already inflated cost of
sugar.

Subsidies that began as rescue funds and backstops for family farms
in the New Deal era have been finagled by corporate lawyers and
predatory capitalists into a special public-private partnership of the
super-rich. The poor live in conditions determined by the law. The
rich change the laws by buying new conditions.

In the CBC's documentary, Big Sugar,
Halloween is called an annual "$4 billion sugar festival." Author Adam
Hookshield calls sugar "the oil of the 18th Century," because of how
sugar generated fortunes and war at the same time.

In the United States today, residents pay three times as much for
sugar as the rest of the world. Most of that revenue goes to three
giant sugar companies that are encamped along the Everglades in Florida.
Cartel: from Wikipedia:

A cartel is a formal (explicit) agreement among competing
firms. It is a formal organization of producers and manufacturers that
agree to fix prices, marketing, and production. Cartels usually occur in
an oligopolistic industry, where there is a small number of sellers and
usually involve homogeneous products. Cartel members may agree on such
matters as price fixing, total industry output, market shares,
allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging,
establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or
combination of these. The aim of such collusion (also called the cartel
agreement) is to increase individual members' profits by reducing
competition.

One can distinguish private cartels from public cartels. In the
public cartel a government is involved to enforce the cartel agreement,
and the government's sovereignty shields such cartels from legal
actions. Contrariwise, private cartels are subject to legal liability
under the antitrust laws now found in nearly every nation of the world.

Competition laws often forbid private cartels. Identifying and
breaking up cartels is an important part of the competition policy in
most countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely
easy, as firms are usually not so careless as to put agreements to
collude on paper.

Above, we referred to rice subsidies in the US creating hunger in Haiti.

Until the 1980s, Haiti grew almost all the rice that it
ate. But in 1986, under pressure from foreign governments including the
United States, Haiti removed its tariff on imported rice. By 2007, 75
percent of the rice eaten in Haiti came from the United States,
according to Robert Maguire, a professor at Trinity Washington
University. Haitians took to calling the product "Miami Rice."

The switch to importing rice was driven by U.S. subsidies for its own
growers, said Fritz Gutwein, Co-Director of the social justice
organization Quixote Center and coordinator of its Haiti Reborn project.
The result in Haiti was a neglect of domestic agriculture that left
many of the country's farmers, still the majority of its population,
unable to support themselves, fueling waves of urban migration and
environmental degradation.

America needs to look at how its own agricultural polices affect Haiti," Gutwein said.FULL article

The untold story is that Haiti's second biggest export, after coffee,
is sugar. This is, in the current economic paradigm, how sugar
subsidies undermine access to dollars in indebted nations.

No one here is defending sugar production itself, however - an
environmentally destructive and labor-exploitative process, and one that
will only increase now that Brazil is paving the way for the worst idea
lately, growing sugar to make alcohol fuel.

As we approach sunset on the day of hycrocarbon Homo sapien, a day
where we mined the unliving substrates of the planet to fire industry
and grow a billions-strong population that depends on a system of
energy-slaves, we are now faced with the threat that to sustain the energy-slave regime, we will mine the topsoil of the planet.

Franklin Roosevelt, who I am not prone to quote, once said, "The
nation that destroys its soil destroys itself." We could just as easily
say, the world that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Right now, 121 countries produce sugar. In studying the
environmental impact, we cannot limit ourselves to food sugar, because
the biofuel folly is growing now.

Sugarcane is guilty of all the sins of industrial monocropping. It
sterilizes soil and causes its erosion. It salinizes soil through
irrigation, which also depletes aquifers. It uses massive petroleum and
chemical inputs that have the adverse effects we already know. It
disrupts biodiversity. What exacerbates the problem with cane is that
it is grown in climates where a great deal of the earth's biodiversity
currently exists; so its impact is considered the worst of any crop in
its destruction of biodiversity.

The Everglades and the Great Barrier Reef are both damaged and
threatened by sugarcane. In New Guinea, sugar regions have already lost
40% of their soil fertility in 30 years.

The working conditions for cane laborers are uniformly dreadful
around the world. The Brazilian ethanol producer, COSAN, is facing a
suit right now for using slave labor.

The deeper issue
is that the land growing sugar is land in countries where land
redistribution for subsistence will be the key to long term survival.

Unfortunately, sugar creates its own demand in its physio-psycholgy; and the demand for sugar is rising around the world.